Hawking, Goldstone and political warfare

When renowned physicist Steven Hawking canceled his participation in President Shimon Peres’s annual conference in Jerusalem, he gave the worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel a major battlefield success.

When renowned physicist Steven Hawking canceled his participation in President
Shimon Peres’s annual conference in Jerusalem, he gave the worldwide campaign to
delegitimize Israel a major battlefield success. This well-financed political war
was launched in September 2001, at the NGO Forum of the UN’s Durban Conference
on Racism, and exploits false allegations of war crimes, “apartheid,” and
“ethnic cleansing” as its principle weapons. The final text called for “the
complete international isolation” of Israel, which is tantamount to the
elimination of nation-state of the Jewish people.

The Durban campaign and
its abuse of human rights claims was the central factor in Hawking’s action. He
had previously been a supporter of Israel, but in 2009 denounced the military
operation in Gaza, referring to the response to Palestinian rocket attacks
against Israeli civilians as “plain out of proportion....

The situation
is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue.”

This
language is an accurate summary of the infamous Goldstone Report, which copied
texts from hundreds of condemnations from the network of political NGOs that had
previously authored and endorsed the Durban statement.

Goldstone’s report
and the NGO publications on which it was based have since been thoroughly
discredited, and Goldstone himself disowned the allegations after the absurdity
of the claims and contradictions in his report were too obvious to
ignore.

Although a highly respected judge, Goldstone failed to look
beyond the NGO political façade when he took on this role, and when he belatedly
acknowledged his own failures, it was too late to reverse the impact on the
delegitimization campaign.

Similarly, although Hawking is a scientist,
when it comes to politics, he has violated all of the tenets of independent
inquiry in examining the evidence (or its absence), instead succumbing to the
propaganda campaign of the Durban process. The professor acknowledges relying on
leaders of the anti- Israel campaigns to mold his assessments, explaining, “I
have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are
unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw
from the conference.”

This is hardly the result of a rational or moral
decision.

At the same time, the Israeli government shares much of the
blame for the failure to rebuff these repeated attacks in the political war. The
campaign to delegitimize Israel began with its founding, and has not stopped
since. In the early decades (before the pretext of occupation after the 1967
war), the Arab League boycott office, located in Damascus, persuaded many firms,
including Pepsi and American Express, not to do business with Israel. And anyone
with an Israeli visa in their passport was barred from entering Arab
countries.

Israel’s leaders during that period did a good job of
defeating the first boycott, but for more than a decade, they have failed to
grasp the impact of the digital-age version, in the form of the Durban
strategy.

In this crucial political combat, Israel is scarcely on the
battlefield, and officials are surprised whenever the delegitimization campaign
scores another victory, as exemplified by Goldstone and now Hawking. This
incompetence stands in sharp contrast to the activities of groups like
Electronic Intifada, (led by Ali Abunimeh), the Palestinian Campaign for the
Academic and Cultural Boycott (Omar Barghouti) and scores of powerful
politicized NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam, as
well as their Israeli and Palestinian affiliates.

This NGO network has
learned how to extract vast sums from European governments, and use these
resources to bombard churches and academic institutions, such as Cambridge
University, where Professor Hawking works, with pseudo-academic speakers and
publications repeating the mantras of war crime and apartheid.

In the
long term, and in order to prevent more Hawking-like defeats and the wider
exploitation of moral principles for immoral objectives, an aggressive,
proactive approach and far more resources are required. Twelve years after the
Durban NGO declaration, the Israeli government has no excuse for treating this
assault and the ongoing process of demonization as a minor irritant.

In
the short term, it is important to show Professor Hawking the contradiction
between the moral language of the delegitimizers and the immoral substance of
their campaigns. In this process, perhaps Hawking will follow the Goldstone
precedent, and recognize that he has been used as part of the ongoing war
against Israel. Until he does, the moral stain caused by his actions will
continue to spread.The author teaches international diplomacy at
Bar-Ilan University and is the president of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based
research institute.

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